 Required reminder, everyone please take a moment to silence your cell phones or any other electronic devices. We can devote ourselves to the proceedings here today. Council has some great events coming up in the not too distant future that I'd like to share. Following on the heels of the deadline for the fiscal cliff, Moody's analytics chief economist Mark Zandy joined us on January the 18th, be able to update us at that point obviously on the outcome of this high drama, as well as give an economic forecast going forward for 2013. On February 7th Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Thomas Friedman will address the challenges America faces in the future and the world of power. And on March the 8th former Irish president Mary Robinson will visit the council and offer her views on her vision for the future of the global system. Additional details on these programs and other events are in your program today and in literature at the registration table. We also have a number of travel opportunities that are coming up that may be of interest, including a 10-day Mediterranean cruise of ancient cities from Malaga Spain to Palermo, Italy, as well as a massive around the moon, and a small group tour of Morocco from the imperial cities to the Sahara. Please be sure to pick up more information about these and other exciting council tours on your way out. All of these events hosted by the council enable us to do our most important programs to a diverse group of over 2,100 middle and high school students in 63 schools throughout the Philadelphia area. None of these programs would be possible without our members and our partners such as Bowie, our corporate sponsor for this afternoon, and a generous supporter of our education programs as well. We're particularly grateful today to the Sabina and Rosy Bacari Foundation for its ongoing support and sponsorship of this series on South Asia and for this program in particular today. Both Dr. Rosy Bacari and his wife, Dr. Sabina Bacari, have been longtime supporters and friends of the council's programs and their foundation has sponsored many events such as today's that help us foster an understanding of what is perhaps the hottest of the world's hotspots in South Asia. Rosy Bacari is the recipient of the Philadelphia Business Journal's 40 under 40 award, a physician turned entrepreneur, managing partner of RBX Capital, and a vice chairman of the Royal Affairs Council. He was unfortunately for us unexpectedly called away for a business meeting and so unable to join us today. But on Rosy's behalf, it's my great pleasure now to introduce our guest founder, Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Ambassador Crocker has had a long and distinguished career in the Foreign Service, serving the United States in the world for nearly four decades. This past July, he retired from his position as ambassador to Afghanistan, opposed E-HEL since July of 2011. Previously, E-HEL five ambassadorships between 1990 and 2009, and as you'll hear, they were all easy cushy posts including appointments in Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait, and Lebanon. Over the years, he's served our country in many positions and during many events of great historical significance. A few to note, the reopening of the American Embassy in Kabul in 2002 and serving at the American Embassy in Peru during both the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the bombings of our embassy and marine barracks in 1983. Before his service, Ambassador Crocker has received a number of distinguished awards throughout his career. To name a few, in 2009 he received Presidential Medal of Freedom, of course, in our nation's highest civilian level. President George W. Bush conferred on him the personal rank of career ambassador in 2004, the highest in the Foreign Service, and in May of 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the establishment of the Ryan C. Crocker Award for Outstanding Achievement in Expeditionary Plungs. When not ministerial to diplomatic affairs, Ambassador Crocker has also had a prestigious career in academia, serving as Dean, Executive Professor, and Edward and Howard cruising down chair at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, and as International Affairs Advisor at the National War College. He is currently teaching at Yale University, where he was recently named the first Kissinger Senior Fellow at the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy. In Ambassador Crocker, our country is fortunate indeed to have a dedicated and insightful representative who has served in what is widely viewed as the most consequential region of our times. Please join me now in welcoming Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Thank you very much Craig for that generous introduction and congratulations to you as you assume the helm of this great World Affairs Council. It's an honor to be here at this moment of transition as Claudia hands over to Craig. Claudia is legendary within and outside the council system and I know she leads it in good hands. I'm kind of a short tenure Claudia, I have a mere quarter of a century but I met Joan Russell earlier. Craig talked about the council trips, well I've just come back from one, to Vietnam. The Philadelphia Council organized and I have never done a tour before. Probably will never do one again in lessons with the Philadelphia Council because you are a gold standard. Sorry to get a little late getting here, like about six weeks late because of Hurricane Sandy. But I very much wanted to take this opportunity. I made a huge fan of World Affairs Councils, 95 of them nationwide. This is one of the biggest and certainly the best. Those of you who heard my regular review, I put in a paid political announcement, an unpaid political announcement. Just to say what an important role this council and others play in ensuring that the American public has an understanding of what goes on in the world beyond our shores and why it is important. So thanks to all of you, thanks in particular to your sponsors led by Boeing for making you the premier organization that you are. I know we've got a number of members of the armed services here today, both past and present. I'm delighted to see them. I know you're trying to eat lunch, but if I could just ask all of those who wear or who have worn our nation uniform if you could stare. The service, I know it's taken some of you to some very hard places. As a member for almost 40 years of another service, the foreign service, we work very, very closely with military in places like Iraq and Afghanistan as we did in Lebanon during the Marine deployment. We take the same oath that you raise our right hands and swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies born in domestic. That doesn't mean just in the cafes and Brussels or the restaurants in Paris. It means in the hard places where our brothers and sisters in uniform are also called to go to be in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. And we take our losses. Most recently, Chris Stevens and his colleague in Benghazi, as Craig pointed out, I have been an ambassador six times to six countries that most sane people would not spend a weekend in. In those six countries, in three of those six countries, one of my predecessors as ambassador was assassinated. And the hard truth is we have lost more ambassadors in the line of duty since the end of World War II than all branches in the military have lost general officers. It is inherently a dangerous profession. We are the most expeditionary of all the nation's services. At least 75% of us are deployed overseas at any given moment. Our largest embassies are not London and Paris or Kabul and Baghdad. There's been a great debate after the assassination of my friend Chris Stevens. So when I knew for 20 years we're a pretty small tribe in the nearest division, my hope is that that debate does not lead to a retrenchment of diplomatic engagement. Because in this tumultuous world that I'll briefly describe, particularly in the Middle East, we need more, not less engagement. If we are to avoid situations that can truly threaten our national security and require even greater expenditure of resources. And again, for those of you who have children in college, I hope they would think about taking a Foreign Service exam. It's given, I think, three times a year. It's free. You may get them out of your basement after you graduate. And as the Marines say, we don't promise you a rose garden, but you will never have a boring day. What I thought I'd do is just briefly sketch out some broad themes on the greater Middle East. The area I define as extending from Morocco on the Atlantic coast through North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Palestinian territories, Iraq, Iran, but also Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's a little bit of an arbitrary definition that I use mainly because I've served in most of those places. But in spite of the differences in ethnicities, in language, in culture, they also share some commonalities. One of them is with the exception, of course, of Israel. They are predominantly Muslim countries. The other is something rather different that we don't think about, but they do. Every one of those countries over the last several hundred years has been occupied by at least one Western power, every single one. In the modern era, it started with Egypt in 1798, when Napoleon invaded and occupied that country. Most of us don't know that Napoleon was ever in Egypt. He just needed to kill a little time between major European engagements and decide to spend it there. The French, the British, the Italians, the Russians all took their turn as imperial states, colonial occupiers. That profoundly affects the view from the region. It means they learned a long time ago, for example, that when the foreigners come with their well-trained, well-equipped armies, better just fade into the woodwork because you can't beat them force on force. Preserve your lives, preserve your energies, wait for them to think it's all done, and then start snaking. What that means, whether it's Morocco under the French or Afghanistan or Iraq with us, the real war doesn't start until long after we think we've already won it. They are very, very good at the counterpunch. Another characteristic is against that sense of occupation, and that affects us. We consider ourselves the ultimate anti-imperialist power given our own history and our revolution. That is not, broadly speaking, how we are seen in the Middle Eastern eyes. We are seen as the successors of the European colonialists, and have to be aware of that and work actively to counteract it. We did that in several forms. We negotiated agreements both in Iraq and Afghanistan, affirming the sovereignty of both states, giving them actual, real control over their own affairs. And in so doing, took that card away from our adversaries who accused us of being occupiers. In my 40 years of diplomacy, I learned a couple of lessons, and I'm going to tell you what they are, but don't worry, they are only two of them, I'm a slow learner. Decades, one lesson. The first I've already prefaced. It's a complicated region with its own way of looking at the West and at us. That means, in simple terms, be careful what you get into. You need to understand the region, a particular country, its people, its history, how it perceives its history, its language, its literature, its culture, before we contemplate a major intervention. We need also to understand that with all the knowledge and planning we may be able to muster. If it's a military intervention, we are not going to be able to predict the consequences. Because we're not talking about just third and fourth order consequences, we are talking about 30th and 40th order consequences. There is no human being alive who could say, well, Iraq in 2012 has turned out precisely as I predicted in March 2003. No way to do it. We found out about unintended consequences, of course, in Lebanon, when the Israelis invaded in 1982 with our passive support. It seemed like a good idea to take down the PLO. What we got in its place, we could not possibly have foreseen that was his fault. Which remains a very lethal actor in Lebanon and beyond. The architect again of both the embassy and the Marine bombings. So, be careful what you get into. And understand and calculate that the gains are worth the risks, including the risks you can't even imagine because they're there. The second lesson I learned is the alverse. Be equally careful over what you propose to get out of. Withdrawal can have consequences even more profound than interventions. When we withdrew the Marines from Lebanon in early 1984, Syria and its ally, Iran, took the lesson that Americans have a low pain threshold and even less patience. So all you got to do is make them bleed and outlast them. They employed exactly the same strategy against us in Iraq in 06, 07. When I arrived in early 07 as ambassador, the Iraq I found reminded me very disturbingly of the Lebanon I had left a quarter of a century before. With Iranian-backed militias resembling Hezbollah, trained by Hezbollah in some cases, occupying large swaths of the south and the center, Sunni insurgents backed by Syria, including al-Qaeda, active in the west. So, again, it was the same duo from hell, Syria and Iran, using proxies as they did in Lebanon to drive us out of Iraq and it almost worked. Dave Petraeus, my great friend and one of the greatest individuals ever in one of the uniform, went in together. One of the hardest things we had to do was not develop and implement a winning strategy. It was to spend most of our lives testifying before Congress in September 2007 as the national sentiment and a sentiment on the hill was just to pull the plug. And what we tried to do was say, ladies, gentlemen, consider the consequences. You're tired, we're tired, we live there, you know, we're really tired. But if we withdraw and leave Iraq to al-Qaeda and Iranian-backed militias, we are risking American national security in a totally irresponsible fashion in view of what happened in Lebanon. Mercifully, the plug was not pulled. Iraq has at least a fighting chance for acceptable security and stability. It is never going to be Switzerland with palm trees. But, you know, we have, I think, at least averted to what could have been a major disaster. We're having the same debate now on Afghanistan. And there we set up a network of bilateral and international agreements that, if implemented, should ensure the Afghans, again, more than a reasonable chance of long-term stability. It requires our engagement and it requires a certain amount of support. The Chicago NATO summit produced pledges to support into the out years an Afghan force of about $230,000. It will cost us about $2.5 billion, roughly half the total expense. That sounds like a lot of money until you consider we're spending roughly $110 million a year currently in Afghanistan. What the Afghans have shown in recent history is that they don't need to be the best army in the world, or the fifth best, they just need to be better than the enemies they're fighting. And after the Soviet withdrawal, the Afghan army was more than a match for the Mujahideen militia groups, hung together with no Soviet advisors or support except financial. The Afghan army did not crumble until the money stopped in 1992. And based on what we've seen of their resolve, their determination, and their increasing capabilities, I think it is not at all unreasonable to expect beyond 2014 that an internationally supported Afghan security force is going to be more than a match for whatever is left of the Taliban and their friends. I'm happy to talk more about Afghanistan and its next door neighbor, Pakistan, which is again perhaps the largest challenge we're going to face in the region, with a population of 180 million people and nuclear weapons with an increasingly active Islamic insurgency inside its own borders. More Pakistani soldiers have died on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier at the hands of these insurgents than the combination of Afghan civilians, Afghan security forces, and coalition security forces, all combined in Afghanistan. So the long-term stability of Pakistan and how we relate to it, I think, is a critical U.S. security imperative. And I wish our leaders wisdom and courage in dealing with it. Let me say just a few words about what is going on in the Arab world broadly, the so-called Arab Spring. That started in Tunisia, of course, in late 2010, spread to Egypt. Major demonstrations in Tahrir Square. You know, the TV camera lights went off about the end of January. Democracy had prevailed, peace had come. Those of us who knew the region said, yeah, well, maybe not quite yet. And we are, of course, seeing the sad truth of that in Libya, in Egypt itself, where President Horsy is under significant challenge, and, of course, in Syria. It is the largest upheaval and the greatest turmoil the Middle East has seen since the revolution of the 1950s. It brought down the monarchies in Iraq and Egypt a bit later in Libya. This time the monarchies are doing pretty well. Thank you very much. Bahrain faced problems early on. Overcame those in a not entirely pleasant way. Bahrain being a small state with a Shia Islamic majority ruled by a Sunni Islam minority. But the monarchies have withstood this very well. It's the so-called republics that are facing the challenges or have had their governments overthrown. And it's, again, a caution there to us. Many Americans were writing off the monarchies as consigned to the dustbin of history decades ago. They've proven remarkably resilient, you know, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the republics have shown themselves to be highly vulnerable. There are more ways of keeping in touch with one's people than holding Greek elections. The Saudis are masters at this. Let me finish by talking about Syria, because that potentially presents the greatest immediate challenge for us and indeed for our Western allies. I would make a couple of points. First, don't count the Assad regime out. It may go down, but I'm not sure of that. One Syrian friend told me that the Assad regime, father and son, has spent 40 years preparing for this moment. A highly cohesive, highly disciplined, very well armed and absolutely ruthless regime. Against a national coalition of Syrian revolutionary and opposition groups that is neither national nor a coalition, which we have recognized, I think we remain uncertain as to what we now do, have you recognized them? My advice to the administration comes back to my earlier point about diplomacy being an inherently risky but very important business. If we've recognized them as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people, well, we need American double mass in there with them. That's what you do with government you recognize. Yes, it would be a very risky proposition, but I can tell you, if tomorrow the President and the Secretary of State were to ask for volunteers, most hands in the Foreign Service would go off for that duty. It's what we do. But that decision has not been taken, so we're kind of flying blind. We're not exactly sure what we've recognized, what their agendas are, what their long-term intentions are, who backs them. And as we've seen in Libya, that can have some pretty lethal results for all concern. First order of business goes back to my first principle of the Middle East, be careful what you get into and know what you're getting into. That doesn't mean do nothing, quite the contrary. It means intelligent engagement, identification of friend and foe that can then lead to sensible policy decisions. And we, unfortunately, are simply not there in terms of promise for policy decisions because we're not there on the ground in Syria. Should the Assad's fall, I think you're going to see a far bloodier mess than we're already looking at. It will be open season on Alawis, the minority Shia schism that rules the country, of which the Assad's are members. But as we saw in Afghanistan, once the Soviets were out, the Afghan factions united against them then turned on each other in a horrific civil war that eventually vented the Taliban. And I think there's every chance you would see that in Syria. These groups do not share the same vision, the same agenda. And I think there's every likelihood of a struggle for power in a post-Assad era. Who would triumph in that struggle? Again, very hard to say, but normally the winners are the best organized, the most determined and the best armed. Unfortunately, that means in Syria the most militant of the Islamists. The remnants of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and their al-Qaeda allies. The Iraqis are kind of the canary in the mineshaft on this as a Shia-governed polity. They are scared to death of what could happen to them if Sunni Islamists take over in Syria. So be careful. You may get what you wish for, the fall of the Assad's. I can't guarantee very much, and I have made a career of not making long-term predictions, but one thing I would confidently predict. You will not see a stable and secure Syria in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Assad regime. And you could see consequences in Iraq, in Jordan, in Lebanon, in Israel from Hezbollah and in Turkey. All those countries are deeply worried about what comes next. All are urging that we are more engaged than we are. Unfortunately, they are all urging different types of engagement, which takes me once again to my point. There is no substitute for not American boots on the ground, but American wingtips and high heels on the ground to sort out and report back what is going on. So with that, let me just make one more pitch. I talked in general about encouraging children who are thinking about what to do to consider the Foreign Service. I particularly encourage young women to think about a career in the Foreign Service. We are approaching 50% female in the service. We are increasingly looking like America. And unlike the military services, there is no assignment and no place, no matter how dangerous, that we will not send a woman to. A large percentage of my staff in both Iraq and Afghanistan, including those downrange, were females. So, you know, if we are not yet at the point where you can command a tank as a woman, well, you can do any job in the Foreign Service that a man can do when one of the same risks of getting your head blown off as an Afghan man should that be a big selling point for me at all. With that, I would be happy to take any other comments or questions. We have microphones. Excellent. Microphones on your side, if you wouldn't mind yelling so loud. That way everyone can hear. Yes. It seems that the Kingdom in Jordan is in some difficulty right now. Could you elaborate on that? Yes, I guess, I suppose. Where that might lead in five, ten years? Well, again, not to be facetious, but the Kingdom of Jordan is always in some kind of trouble or other. The British deployed airborne troops there in 1958, for example, because it looked like the young King Hussein was going to go down in the wake of the Iraqi Revolution. Jordan, as many of you know, is a very fragile polity almost equally divided between Palestinians who moved into Jordan in successive ways, beginning with the creation of the State of Israel and what are called East Bank Jordanians, those who were born in Jordan. In 1970, Hussein again almost lost his throne in the events of Black September. So named by the Palestinians who wound up losing, but they made a very serious attempt to take over the entire country. And in this, they are of the same mind. It's kind of interesting how it works. Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon would be in complete agreement that there is a State of Palestine in its Jordan. You're seeing some of these same tensions emerge. Part of it, new vibrations of the Arab Spring. Part of it, economic hardship. Jordan is a poor country that has a very small resource base. Part of it, again, instigated by radical Islamic elements both inside and outside the country. Is the monarchy in pearl in Jordan not, in my view, at this stage? Should the Assad regime collapse and a radical Sunni group ascend, then they would be in pearl. Again, history on which we're great people, but what we're not is patient, and we are relentlessly monolingual and ahistorical. There's a great book written a long time ago by a Lebanese American named Philip Hitti called The History of the Arab Peoples. 1939, I think, is when the first edition came out. He talks in there about Syria. Syria in 1939 was Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Israel, Lebanon, and modern-day Syria. There are a lot of Syrians who would like to bring back the historical Syria, you know, with an eye initially to Jordan and Lebanon. And again, the Assad's were prudent enough not to do newly rash things. I'm not sure what a successful regime would do. Interesting footnote. Black September failed. The Palestinian bid to take over Jordan failed in large part because after the Syrian government ordered an armored column into Jordan in support of Palestinians, the commander of the Air Force, one Hafez al-Assad, declined to give them or the Palestinians air support. A few months later, he took over the country. Thank you. I'd like to ask you, since you didn't mention Egypt, a new question that take over Syria by the Muslim Brotherhood. They are very conservative Sunni sect, such as Morsi, or political party. And Morsi went to the University of Southern California, which is a very reputable Middle East studies program. And Saudi Arabia and all of these monarchies in the Gulf being Sunni, and such strong allies to the point that we allied with Kuwait to push Iraq out. I wonder why there is this disposition currently in Washington to be prejudiced against a Muslim Brotherhood government, a conservative Sunni government in Syria? Again, I'd like to think that policy in Washington had evolved to the point of having a position on a conservative Muslim government in Syria. About as far as we're gone is saying that Assad should go and that we recognize the National Coalition, whatever it is, I would be concerned about not a conservative Muslim government arising in Syria, but a deeply radicalized, militant Islamic movement taking control. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is not like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. And we've already got, and the Egyptians have a problem of President Morsy's policies both on Islamization and autocratic rule. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is highly radicalized because, again, an event that occurred that most Americans never knew about at the time and certainly have forgotten if they did. February 1982 faced with a Muslim Brotherhood insurgency in Syria that started on Syria's fourth largest city of Hama. Assad ordered the city ringed by arm and artillery and reduced it to rubble, killing between 10 and 20,000 people, al-Sunnis, almost al-Sunnis. He killed 100 or two Muslim Brothers in the process and eliminated that threat. But the Sunnis, generally, and the remnants of the Brotherhood have gotten it. They make this Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood look like the PDA. So that's what would worry me and I think that's what would worry Washington once they get around to thinking about it. What should we do about Pakistan? It's a great question. Winston Churchill is widely quoted as saying, you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they've tried everything else. We have tried pressuring Pakistan. We have tried walking away from Pakistan, which we did after the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. In the space of the single year they went, as they put it, from being the most allied of allies to being the most sanctioned of adversaries. When we withdrew all economic and military assistance because of their nuclear weapons program that they had announced 15 years before, but never mind, we needed them in Afghanistan so we were prepared to forget it until we didn't need them anymore and then we stopped seeking waivers to the press of amendment and the sanctions went into play. This has created a psychosis almost in Pakistan that, well, okay, you Americans are back. What are you leaving again and what mess are you going to leave us with? It's one of the reasons that they hitched their bets through some support for the Taliban. They do not want to see a situation in which the U.S. withdraws the Taliban takes over Afghanistan again, but this time it's the Taliban that they took on with force of arms and will be a bitter, determined, and very dangerous adversary. So my view is, in spite of all the problems we have with Pakistan, that we do everything we can to cement a long-term strategic relationship that will change over time their strategic calculus as to what is and isn't in their interest. I think they've already figured out that support for Islamic radicalism is getting a lot of Pakistanis killed. They're not sure they've got another alternative. We could be that alternative, but it will take a courageous political decision to do so. During my years arrow 407, I worked hard to try and cement that. We pushed through the F-16 sale, which had enormous symbolic significance since we withheld the delivery of F-16s when we sanctioned them. That went a long way at the time, but it has to be a sustained policy. And I think that is the only thing that is going to work. Otherwise, it's the danger of, again, a country of 180 million people with a lot of nuclear weapons that could be governed by some people who are really dangerous. Thank you. I'm going to be a little bit negative here. I would like to make a statement, and I'd like to comment on a plea. When the Taliban ran Afghanistan, the poppy fields were closed, and the flow of drugs stopped, we go in there, and the poppy fields are over again, which makes me wonder who the good guys or the bad guys are. The first thing that is important is to understand why the Taliban banned poppy cultivation in the last year of their regime. They did it to drive up prices, and they did drive them up by almost ten-fold. They did it not to take drugs off the street. They did it to make more of a profit on the drugs they already had. And I think, had they persisted in power, once again, it's market forces, whether you're dealing with illicit or illicit profits, they would have gone back to cultivation at a level that sustained the prices they wanted. I would rule. Because of demand, largely in the West, prices are pretty darn good, but you are right to be critical. After ten years, none of us have found a good way to dramatically reduce poppy cultivation. You know, we've tried forced eradication. The only thing that historically has worked, in Pakistan, is alternative crops that will give a farmer at least as much income as he will get from growing poppies, combined with penalties for growing poppies. So, incentive plus penalty. We haven't got the incentive thing down yet, but it's going to work, and we've taken too long, I think, to make a sustained effort on this. Again, you know, Afghanistan is hard. Anyone who served there knows that, and you go for the wolf that's closest to the sled. And for us, that has been, you know, the armed insurgency, with narcotics taking a second place, even though it helps fuel the insurgency. Thank you so much for your time. I'm Eliza Burger from Heritage School, and I was wondering if the Constitution was passed in Egypt this Saturday. What do you think would happen to the role of women in Egyptian society? Yeah, I don't know what the form of the current text is, but it's one of the things we're concerned about with the current government. They have put widely not shown an inclination to give equal opportunity to women. Earlier drafts made no mention of the protection of the rights of all citizens, including women, equal opportunity for all citizens. What will actually, the current text again, I don't know. I know there was an effort to rewrite parts of that. But among the many things that would concern me in Egypt is the future of women. I am even more concerned about the future of women in Afghanistan, should we decide we're done there before the Afghans are ready to really take their future in their own hands. Women have made enormous progress in Afghanistan. That constitution mandates that 25% of parliament will be female. The actual number or percentage is higher because women are winning seats in head-to-head competition with male candidates. 40% of 8 million students in Afghanistan are female. If the Taliban comes back, I would drop to zero, just as it was when I arrived in 2002. So again, no one to Islam or political Islam can cut two ways. There are Islamic governments like that, the current government in Afghanistan is the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Islam is written into the constitution, but so are equal rights for women. The two are not incompatible. And those who say, particularly Muslims who say they are, need to reflect that the prophet's favored wife, Khadija, basically he married for her money because she was a very successful businesswoman running caravans all over the Arabian peninsula. And that was just fine with the prophet. Time for one last question. You know, World Affairs Council, Bernard Lewis characterized the Middle East as a place where often governments that are friendly to the US are combined with a general populace that hates our culture and hates everything we're all about. And I think he used Egypt and Saudi Arabia as an example of that. And he used Iran as an example of a government that is very unfriendly to us, combined with a population that, for the most part, it is not unfriendly. Could you comment on that and maybe reference specifically to where Pakistan might fall? I can speak directly to Egypt and Pakistan having served three years in each country. You know, I never felt a strong anti-American tendency among the general population, not quite the opposite. I never felt threatened. Love to go down to Cairo's Grand Bazaar. Just have a cup of tea with shopkeepers and they found out you were American. Have another cup of tea. It's on the house. It tended to be, if you can say there was anti-Americanism, it would be along the lines of, we love you, we don't like your policies, particularly vis-a-vis the Israeli Arab dispute. But I never saw that personalized. I never saw it in Pakistan either. I was talking to my friends from Boeing earlier who make the magnificent Chinook among many other great products. The Chinook was deployed in Pakistan in support of earthquake relief efforts in 2005 when 80,000 Pakistanis died in two minutes. It was the largest and longest humanitarian relief effort airborne since the Berlin Airlift and the Chinooks carried almost all the freight. This was up into the northwest of Pakistan considered a home for anti-American militants. We did not have during the six months of that mission a single incident of hostile action against an American service member or civilian or against one of our helicopters. Indeed, we got great big American flag decals and put them on the fuselage of the Chinooks. The first ones in came from Afghanistan where they were in a war and when we proposed this to the air crews they said, well, great, why don't we just shoot them down ourselves and save everybody the bar? They said, look, we know what we're doing. That American flag Chinook became the symbol of all that's good in this country and was highly, highly popular with the people not with the government. So there certainly are militants who want to kill and do kill Americans but that is not reflective of either the Egyptian population or the Pakistani population and certainly in my experience. Thank you all. I'm sorry we didn't get to every question. Before you leave the stage, Mr. Basra, I'd like to invite Patrick Donnelly from Boeing to make a special gift presentation. So Ambassador Crocker, on behalf of Boeing and the Bukhari Foundation, the World Affairs Council, we'd like to thank you today for sharing your views. Now, just for that, we're going to give you a document called Berkshire's Views of Philadelphia. Now, William Berksh was an artist who captured images of colonial Philadelphia and this was actually compiled by Robert Tealman, who was the director of the World Affairs Council. So on behalf of us, I'd like to thank you. Not only did he sit today, but he serviced the country. Thank you very much. And to all of you who didn't have the opportunity to do so as well. Before we adjourn, I'd like to ask everyone to please stay seated briefly for the Council's annual meeting. And I'd like to invite John Walsh, the chairman of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia to the podium to preside over that meeting. Thanks, Greg. Well, as you know, when you signed up to hear the insights of Ambassador Crocker that you were going to be part of an annual meeting. But seeing we have you all here today, I wanted to take a few minutes to take you through and update you on what's been going on in the Council. And I really have a plumb assignment today. Having done none of the work myself, I get to bring you up to speed on the tremendous work that Claudia and Craig and their teams have been doing over the last year. When we think about the Council, we think about a vision of building global citizens. And today is a great example of a program that does just that in enhancing our knowledge of critical and complex issues. And when we think about that, we have three platforms. Teach, Talk, Travel. I'll talk briefly about each. First on the Teach side, the Education program.